Sinking Into The Maelstrom
”About his own work Jack was modest, although he’d occasionally state with impish pride: “I’ve made a few good pictures.” He didn’t like to talk about his war art, as he felt it had often been co-opted to serve agendas that the paintings themselves didn’t support. (Jack always insisted that Drowning Man represented all the war dead: Allied and Axis; military and civilian.) One day, he recalled a horrific naval battle near Brest and collapsed in sorrow. I’ve always thought this event was likely a main source of his post-traumatic stress disorder.”(cora golden, globeandmail.com )
Jack Nichols, Mess Deck
The ability to capture the despair and loneliness of his own life and those of the Depression era were his articulation. He adopted the figurative tradition as point of departure; a realistic regard at life, but realized in an intensely personal manner. A son of Russian immigrants fleeing pogroms and poverty stricken childhood.Left to his own devices, he was self taught. There is a heaviness to his work. Swirling fabric and dense composition leaving little space for lightness of spirit. The emotion of war is perfectly depicted. Despair drenches his canvases, overwhelming the viewer. Even in the painting Troops in Hospital there is only temporary relief from the threat of death. The expansive gestures and expressions are similar to the work of Otto Dix; haunted and hunted figures stalked by death. Even the stench is figurative and palpable.
“Nobody has done the Jack Nichols show yet. The nature of his great talent is yet to be fully explored,” says Mr. Reid of the AGO ( Art Gallery of Ontario ). “It will be very much about this man’s own psychology, I suspect, because he was extremely sensitive in very particular ways and that touches his work all the way through.”
Jack Nichols ( 1921-2009 )was appointed an official Canadian war artist in April 1944 with the rank of lieutenant. Nichols was present at the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, later sketched on a number of warships, and was on board HMCS Iroquois during the attempted evacuation of Brest by the Germans in August 1944. Nichols was released from the navy in October 1946. Unlike most war artists, he concentrated not on armaments, ships or planes, but on human experience, the fear of death, the sanctity of human life, the religiosity of sacrifice. Instead of panoramas, he focused on individuals – both combatants and refugees – and the intensity of their personal responses to the apocalyptic horror of modern warfare.
”He had a poetry and pathos about his depiction of humanity that nobody else could touch,” said York University art historian Anna Hudson, but “he couldn’t deal with the marketplace.”…Friends reported seeing him walk past them on the street, looking unkempt, carrying shopping bags, often with a wild look in his eye, his beard flowing down to his chest.”
Troops in Hospital
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